and heaviness of deportment" resulted in Daly urging him to exert himself more; Kemble took offence and refused to continue in the part until Daly apologised. However, Kemble's "wonderful strength" in the title-role of Robert Jephson's The Count of Narbonne won much acclaim; in this he was supported by Daly in the character of Theodore, while "Miss Francis" (who was to become the celebrated Mrs Jordan) played the part of Adelaide. Jephson himself attended rehearsals; the play ran for thirty very profitable nights, and Daly was praised as a "rising theatrical genius". Elizabeth Inchbald performed for Daly in 1782 and in the following January he brought Elizabeth Fitzhenry out of retirement to reprise six of her best-known portrayals "prior to taking her final leave of the stage". In February he travelled to London and engaged Sarah Siddons for a limited number of performances in the summer, when she duly appeared at Smock Alley alongside her brother John Kemble and sister Elizabeth Whitlock (whom the Dublin press dismissed as "Mrs Siddons's appendage"). The theatre was "crowded to suffocation" to see Siddons in the title role in Isabella (an adaptation by David Garrick of Thomas Southerne's The Fatal Marriage, in which she had been the sensation of Drury Lane's previous season), and she afterwards appeared as Belvidera in Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd, and as Jane Shore in Nicholas Rowe's tragedy of that name. Her engagement was sufficiently successful that Daly renewed it for the following season, for a reported fee of one thousand guineas. Also in 1784 he engaged John Henderson, Alexander Pope, Elizabeth Younge (the future Mrs Pope) and Joseph George Holman, and he had Kemble, Henderson, Pope and Holman play Hamlet on alternate nights in the same week. First opera productions In 1783 he began to intersperse the usual dramatic fare at Smock Alley with major operatic productions, Giusto Fernando Tenducci arranging and performing in Thomas Arne's Artaxerxes and William Bates's Pharnaces. In January 1784, Tenducci and Elizabeth Billington sang the title-roles in Christoph Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice and, during their joint season, they received "uncommon bursts of applause from the most brilliant and crowded audiences that ever honoured a theatre". The musicians included Billington's husband on double-bass and were led by her brother, the violinist Charles Weichsel, and the scenery, "in a new style", was the work of the landscape painter Thomas Walmsley whose employment at the theatre "did